Puffs of racial steam

Are things as bad as the Oscar-winning film makes them out to be?

TWO young black men carjack a white woman's expensive SUV; a white, working-class police officer gropes a rich black woman while her husband, a black Hollywood executive, looks on in impotent rage; a Latina police detective and a Korean woman hurl racial insults at each other after a minor traffic accident; an Iranian shopkeeper sets off to kill a Latino locksmith who he assumes has cheated him. These are just some of the scenes in “Crash”, which at last weekend's Academy Awards won three Oscars—for best picture, best original screenplay and best editing—with its vivid, often amusing, portrayal of the racial tensions of Los Angeles.

Is racial conflict in America's second-largest city really so raw and pervasive? In the past month, fighting between Latino and black inmates in the Los Angeles County jail system has led to two deaths and left more than 100 people injured. Last year, there were several near-riots between Latino and black students at the giant Jefferson High School, just south of downtown LA.

In 1992, much of Los Angeles was caught up in rioting after the acquittal of four police officers, three of them white and the other Latino, for the brutal beating the previous year of a black man, Rodney King. The violence lasted for six days: 55 people were killed and almost 2,400 injured. Back in 1965, in the deprived area of Watts, the questioning by a white policeman of a black motorist sparked six days of destruction that left 34 people dead.

Yet opinions on race relations are themselves influenced by race: white Angelenos, living in the prosperous and near-homogenous western part of the city, tend to be considerably more optimistic (or complacent) than the Latino and black residents of the poorer south and east. A study last year by the Public Policy Institute of California found that 70% of blacks and 64% of Latinos thought race relations in LA County were either “not so good” or “poor”, whereas the figure for whites was 52%, and for Asians just 36%. Similarly, 73% of blacks and 50% of Latinos thought that police treatment of racial groups was fair “only some of the time” or “almost never”. A mere 30% of whites, and 38% of Asians, held this negative view. As Earl Ofari Hutchinson, a black activist in Los Angeles, wryly notes: “Many blacks take it as an article of faith that most whites are hopelessly racist.”

The obvious correlation is with economic status: whites and Asians are at the top of the heap while Latinos and blacks struggle at the bottom. When the Watts riots broke out, the neighbourhood was almost entirely African-American. Today the black proportion of the Watts population is down to 38%, while the Latino share is 61%. As the Latino population grows with immigration, especially from Mexico, blacks throughout the region are finding it ever more difficult to get jobs and housing.

Today Latinos make up at least 45% of the 10m residents of LA County, and blacks only 10%. Jamal Watkins, the western regional director of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (and a man who has seen “Crash” twice), reckons that “many bosses, based on prejudice, prefer to hire a Hispanic.”

Probably so, though it is an oversimplification to think solely in terms of black versus Latino. In the 1992 riots, for example, many of the rioters' targets were Korean and other Asian businesses (the previous November, a Korean shopkeeper had shot dead a black girl who she thought was shoplifting). Latinos and blacks were equally represented among the arrests, and there were some white looters, too.

Yet it is questionable whether all this amounts to the seething cauldron of racial unrest portrayed in “Crash”. Gregory Rodriguez, a leading Latino commentator, believes that Los Angeles “does a remarkable job of mixing in an extraordinary array of people from around the globe.” He notes, too, that the battles between the city's Latino and black gangs are not primarily about race but about territory, and the drug-trafficking that goes with it. It is a mistake to “categorise the minorities by the behaviour of their most aberrant members.”

Clearly so. It helps, too, to remember that Antonio Villaraigosa, LA's first Latino mayor since 1872, was elected last year with 59% of the vote by forging a coalition that included black voters as well as Latinos and whites.

Not everyone is convinced. Mr Hutchinson runs an “urban policy roundtable” each week, sometimes involving officers from the much-maligned LA Police Department, and sadly he has yet to hear blacks talking favourably about their relations with Latinos. “Crash”, in his opinion, was a welcome call for everyone to “confront their stereotypes”. Perhaps its audience will recall that famous plea from Rodney King: “Can we all get along?”